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The GOP’s January 6 lies have reached a fever pitch

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On Friday, the Republican National Committee officially stated that the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, which left at least <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol-deaths.html">five dead</a> and about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/us/politics/capitol-riot-police-officer-injuries.html">140 injured</a>, was “legitimate political discourse.”
In a two-page <a href="https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/rnc-censure-resolution/58226d40412e4f18/full.pdf">censure resolution</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/22917728/liz-cheney-adam-kinzinger-censure-january-6-committee">condemning</a> Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their participation in the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack, the RNC wrote that “Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.”
In a subsequent tweet, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPChairwoman/status/1489693461452361748?s=20&t=Ql9-CnnWx7T3qC0AIG7sVA">expanded</a> on the language of the censure to clarify that it referred to “ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”
The original text of the resolution, however — which, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/us/politics/republicans-jan-6-cheney-censure.html">the New York Times notes</a>, was “carefully negotiated in private among party members” before publication — is a fitting cap to a week that saw the GOP, led by former President Donald Trump, draw closer than ever to explicitly supporting the attack on the Capitol and its goal of overturning the 2020 election.
In addition to the censure, Trump last Saturday told supporters at a rally in Conroe, Texas, that he would <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/30/politics/trump-rally-texas/index.html">consider pardoning</a> those charged in connection with the January 6 attack, and <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/02/trump-considered-blanket-pardons-for-jan-6-rioters-before-he-left-office-00004738">Politico reported on Wednesday</a> that he also contemplated doing so before leaving office in January last year.
“If I run and if I win [in 2024], we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly,” Trump <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/30/politics/trump-rally-texas/index.html">said at the rally</a>, without addressing any specific concerns about the treatment of rioters. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”
Trump also said in a <a href="https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/1487943126396411906?s=20&t=ZBTpGUa4z4hu4gcfwHPrTg">statement last week</a> that former Vice President Mike Pence “could have overturned the Election!” — an assertion that, while incorrect, is among Trump’s most overt remarks about the intent behind January 6 and his actions leading up to it.
Trump has not yet announced an official run for the presidency in 2024, but <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-drops-hint-about-2024-run-calling-himself-47th-president-2022-1">signs point</a> to a likely White House bid as he retains a tight grip on the GOP rank and file.
In the meantime, large swaths of the Republican party, still apparently in Trump’s thrall, have shifted their position on the Capitol insurrection, distancing themselves from the disturbing reality of those events and positioning the insurrectionists as innocent protesters, or even patriotic guardians of the Constitution.
That <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/03/lindsey-graham-familiar-arc-trump-bringing-his-gop-allies-meekly-heel/">reversal</a> — from horror at the falsehood-fueled spectacle that unfolded at the Capitol last January to condemnation of Republicans who defy Trump’s narrative — may have coalesced even more clearly over the past week and a half, but it’s been building almost since the attack, spearheaded by members of Congress like Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
While some establishment Republicans, including <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/04/politics/romney-gop-cheney-kinzinger-censure-vote/index.html">Sen. Mitt Romney</a>, have spoken out against the censure and praised Cheney’s and Kinzinger’s moral compasses, while <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/592462-graham-defends-opposition-to-jan-6-pardons-after-trump-calls-him-a-rino">others have expressed dismay</a> at the idea of a future President Trump pardoning January 6 rioters, many have bought so wholeheartedly into Trump’s narrative that they attacked <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/us/politics/pence-trump-election.html">Pence</a> for accurately disputing on Thursday Trump’s assertion that he could have overturned the results of the election.
Trump’s assertion that he wants fair treatment for the January 6 defendants may be superficially benign, but in reality, it’s just one front in the GOP attempt to mythologize the attack as less severe than it was.
Trump, along with members of Congress like Gaetz and Greene and would-be members like Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance, have made misleading statements about the slightly more than 700 people arrested for their roles in the attack, including describing them as “<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-visited-jan-6-rioters-jailed-patriot-wing-2021-11">political prisoners</a>” and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/08/politics/fact-check-jd-vance-capitol-charges/index.html">claiming that they haven’t been charged with crimes</a> (they have).
The subtext of Trump’s argument about fairness is particularly alarming, given the shocking violence directed against police defending the Capitol on January 6. By floating pardons should he regain office, Trump rewrites the limits of acceptable behavior for his supporters — and reinforces that those loyal to Trump are in the right and will be rewarded for their loyalty, while those who oppose his claims to power are not only wrong, but unprincipled.
“There is no room for dissenters from Donald Trump’s views in the Republican party,” Alex Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told Vox in a Sunday interview.
Gaetz and Greene — both <a href="https://www.axios.com/jan-6-social-media-congress-democrats-40237d4e-7e9f-41f4-95b5-da7546aa6dc1.html">ardent supporters of Trump</a> — are leading proponents of the narrative that January 6 attendees are being mistreated (<a href="https://apnews.com/article/records-rebut-claims-jan-6-rioters-55adf4d46aff57b91af2fdd3345dace8">they’re not</a>). <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-jail-gop/2021/07/29/8362d17e-f096-11eb-bf80-e3877d9c5f06_story.html">Last summer</a>, they, along with Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) visited a DC jail where some January 6 defendants were being held, demanding access as members of Congress and erroneously claiming they oversaw the budget for the jail, according to the Washington Post.
The group, joined by Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Bob Good (R-VA), also barged into the Justice Department this past summer, with Gosar calling January 6 defendants “political prisoners” and attempting to ask whether any of the defendants were being held in solitary confinement, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-jail-gop/2021/07/29/8362d17e-f096-11eb-bf80-e3877d9c5f06_story.html">Washington Post’s Meagan Flynn</a> reported at the time.
The January 6 defendants are facing <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases">a variety of charges</a>, ranging from <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/january-6-riot-felony-obstruction-charges">obstructing an official proceeding of the government</a> to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/1/16/22886516/stewart-rhodes-seditious-conspiracy-january-6-oath-keepers">seditious conspiracy</a>. Some have already been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/06/jan6-sentencings-judges/">convicted and sentenced</a>; as of the one-year anniversary of the attack, the longest sentence was just over five years in prison.
As Keyssar <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/29/how-will-the-history-books-remember-2021-526219">told Politico</a> in a 2021 retrospective in December, the insurrection of January 6 accelerated “the downward spiral of American political life” and set off an “intensified, rancorous struggle over the preservation of democratic values and institutions.”
Trump’s insistence on pursuing his self-serving narrative of victimhood — and pulling the Republican Party along with him — doesn’t just affect the GOP, as Keyssar points out; it ultimately affects the functioning of democracy and people’s ability to participate in it. “It’s not just a matter of telling different stories,” Keyssar told Vox on Sunday.
Specifically, he said, Trump’s rhetoric around the insurrection is “storytelling to justify a particular social order.” According to Keyssar, the narratives forming around the insurrection echo the end of the Reconstruction period in the South following the Civil War. The Reconstruction era gave Black Americans unprecedented rights, power, and political representation for a brief period, until the end of the 19th century; in the decades following Reconstruction, the prevailing narrative among white Southerners was that the Civil War was an attack on Southerners’ ways of life, and the Reconstruction period was the result of corrupt Northern “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” taking over the remains of that society.
At the time, Keyssar said, the white Southern narrative argued that the disenfranchisement of Black Southerners and reinforcement of white supremacy “had to be restored in order to have a ‘good society’ again.” In the same vein now, Trump’s fiction — that he was the true winner of the 2020 election and widespread fraud robbed him of a second term in office; that members of his own party who don’t support his lies are unpatriotic; and that the people who protested and stormed the Capitol on January 6 aren’t criminals — aims to restore him to power.
Just because Trump’s talking points around the 2020 election and the Republican Party’s embrace of them aren’t exactly unprecedented, that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous, Keyssar said.
The polarization of the two parties, and their dominance in state legislatures, has emboldened <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/31/florida-voting-laws-elections-00003952">some places to propose laws</a> <a href="https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2022/02/03/west-virginia-lawmakers-advance-bill-to-enhance-voter-fraud-penalty/">targeting voter fraud</a> — though there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election — which can have the real-world effect of making it more difficult for disenfranchised communities, including Black people and those in poverty, to vote.
Furthermore, Keyssar said, the constant effort to delegitimize the election does serve to negate the peaceful means of changing power, which could portend further violence in one form or another. “If you discredit the mechanism of elections,” he said, “then what are you left with? Force.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/2/6/22920432/trump-republican-party-january-6-lies-pardon-rioters">https://www.vox.com/2022/2/6/22920432/trump-republican-party-january-6-lies-pardon-rioters</a>

vox The GOP’s January 6 lies have reached a fever pitch

On Friday, the Republican National Committee officially stated that the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, which left at least five...

Why Lata Mangeshkar was an Indian music icon

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Lata Mangeshkar, the Indian playback singer who loaned her coy, girlish voice to the heroines of Indian film for more than seven decades and became one of Bollywood’s most powerful figures in the process, died Sunday in Mumbai. The singer, 92, had been hospitalized since early January with Covid-19.
Indian cinema is so intertwined with its music — just watch any classic Bollywood film — that a film can be a hit or a bomb depending solely on the catchiness of its songs. So directors chased Mangeshkar to breathe life into their Busby Berkeley-esque song-and-dance numbers with her impossible high notes and emotive delivery. The singer, whose voice could stretch an impressive four octaves (for comparison, Mariah Carey’s range is five), is believed to have recorded thousands of songs in more than 30 languages from Hindi to Urdu to Tamil to Bengali, as well as her native Marathi.
Upon news of Mangeshkar’s death, the actress Kajol, who lip-synced to Mangeshkar’s mellifluous voice in the film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxgvob1Ew0c">Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge</a>, shared a tweet that suggested just how prolific the singer’s career was. “If we play her songs one by one,” the <a href="https://twitter.com/itsKajolD/status/1490218915854979077">actress wrote</a>, “we could hear her for a month and never hear the same song again.”
Mangeshkar’s death was also met with the announcement of a national two-day mourning, and her star-studded state funeral in Mumbai on Sunday drew political and Bollywood royalty, from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to beloved film star Shah Rukh Khan.
The term “playback singer” refers to a background player who sings the songs penned by composers and lip-synced on-screen by actors, but along with a few other high-profile South Asian singers, Mangeshkar managed to defy the rules of the role. Though her songs appeared across Indian film, her rise to fame came largely in tandem with the explosion of Bollywood into a <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/235837/value-of-the-film-industry-in-india/">more than $2 billion-dollar industry</a> with a global audience, a fact of which Mangeshkar seemed keenly aware. Though her singing voice could be famously coquettish, Mangeshkar was loud about singers’ right to cash in on the songs they’d helped to make famous, leading a battle for singers’ royalties that stretched for much of her career.
“What do I get from this? I don’t get any royalty. Now there is internet and the MP3 format,” she lamented in 2012 after her songs, owned not by her but by publishing companies, began appearing on various albums. In 2018, thanks in part to Mangeshkar’s decades-long cry for change, Indian singers began receiving royalties, and Mangeshkar was dubbed a feminist for her calls for fair pay and her ambition.
Mangeshkar, whose father was a classically trained singer, entered films at age 13 in an effort to support her family after her father’s death. Nicknamed “Lata Didi” — elder sister — and “Nightingale” or “Melody Queen” in the media and by many fans, Mangeshkar quickly became India’s own songbird, its answer to Edith Piaf. Mangeshkar, however, stands apart from the Western musical canon as much for her longevity as for her prodigious output: She appeared on hit albums for four decades, and is reported to have sometimes recorded several songs in a single day. “I recorded two songs in the morning, two in the afternoon, two in the evening and two at night,” she <a href="https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/how-lata-mangeshkar-had-to-fight-for-song-credit/511629/">would say</a>.
Her voice rang out (and still does) from India’s movie theaters and television sets, from cars and wedding halls. Though her face only appeared on-screen a few times in her career — she told reporters she hated acting — she was featured on <a href="https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/19810215-lata-mangeshkar-the-incredible-singing-machine-772672-2013-11-28">magazine covers</a> as “The Incredible Singing Machine” and interviewed widely. After the end of colonial British rule, she proudly performed for the nation’s new leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru.
Directors declared her a chameleon distinct among the sea of Indian playback singers, which happened to include her own sister, Asha Bhosle. Love songs, such as her 2006 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ikZtcgAMxo">Luka Chuppi</a>, about a mother mourning her son’s death, were rendered a little more heartbreaking, and romantic songs, like her famous <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFr6G5zveS8">Lag Jaa Gale</a>, a smidgeon more stirring in Mangeshkar’s hands, while seductive <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETyzbcajHUI">numbers</a> betrayed a unique vulnerability as the singer dialed into each character.
This weekend, Amitabh Bachchan, the legendary Bollywood actor whose films regularly featured Mangeshkar’s voice, <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/voice-of-a-million-centuries-has-left-us-big-b-pays-respect-to-lata-mangeshkar-visits-the-singers-home-with-daughter-shweta/articleshow/89386592.cms">took to his blog</a> to acknowledge the value of Mangeshkar’s sacrifices. “The voice of a million centuries has left us … her voice resounds now in the Heavens.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/2/6/22920720/death-lata-mangeshkar-singer-indian-music-icon-bollywood">https://www.vox.com/2022/2/6/22920720/death-lata-mangeshkar-singer-indian-music-icon-bollywood</a>

vox Why Lata Mangeshkar was an Indian music icon

Lata Mangeshkar, the Indian playback singer who loaned her coy, girlish voice to the heroines of Indian film for more than seven decades an...

ESPN Analyst US Shouldn’t ‘Criticize’ China’s Uyghur Genocide When Republicans Violate ‘Voting Rights’

ESPN guest analyst JA Adande laid cover for China’s human rights abuses of the Uyghur population by claiming that America has no room to “criticize” China because Republicans are stripping away “voting rights” of nonwhites in the US.
On Friday’s episode of Around the Horn, Adande, who’s president of the Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, pushed back against the notion that China is guilty of genocide and attacked the U.S. instead.
“I think it’s standard in sports right now- you have to have a cognitive dissonance. You need to compartmentalize,” Adande said.
“We’ve never had a more enjoyable NFL Playoffs in this country, and we’ve never had more people watching the playoffs, and yet it goes on amid the ongoing allegations against Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Football Team, and, you know, the continuous concussion concerns, and now the concerns about diversity in the allegations and questions about competitive integrity even, all of that, and yet we’re still enjoying the games,” Adande began.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" readability="4.3606557377049">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/jadande?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jadande</a> talks about reconciling watching the Beijing Winter Olympics amid China's human rights crisis <a href="https://t.co/mqkOygjBXV">pic.twitter.com/mqkOygjBXV</a>
— Around The Horn (@AroundtheHorn) <a href="https://twitter.com/AroundtheHorn/status/1489724194564751363?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 4, 2022</a></blockquote>
Adande then equated voter ID laws to genocide without evidence, claiming America has no room to criticize China over human rights abuses of Uyghurs given Republican efforts to verify voter identity in elections.
“And who are we to criticize China’s human rights records when we have ongoing attacks by the agents of the state against unarmed citizens, and we’ve got assaults on the voting rights of our people of color in various states in this country,” Adande said.
“So sports – I think it is possible, and it’s necessary more than ever to just shut everything out if you are to enjoy the actual games themselves,” he concluded.
<div class="wxEjJoKx"><a href="https://www.infowarsstore.com/survival-shield-x-3-1-oz?ims=oscuk&utm_campaign=x3hero&utm_source=Infowars+Hero&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=x3hero" target="_blank"><img src="https://api.directus.libertycdn.com/uploads/_/originals/X3-hero-385-2.jpg" /></a></div>
This comes as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) discouraged criticism of China’s human rights abuses during the Olympic Games in Beijing, <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/they-are-ruthless-pelosi-warns-us-olympians-not-to-speak-out-against-chinese-government/" target="_blank">begging lawmakers not to “incur their anger”</a> because the Chinese Communist Party is “ruthless.”
The 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing began on Friday amid COVID lockdowns in the region and US diplomatic boycotts over China’s coverup of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Viewership during the opening ceremony <a href="https://www.outkick.com/olympics-ratings-plummet-to-all-time-low-on-opening-night/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">plummeted to an all-time low</a>, garnering only 7.25 million viewers on NBC on Friday, down 55% from 2018.
<hr class="wp-block-separator" />
<a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/espn-analyst-us-shouldnt-criticize-chinas-uyghur-genocide-when-republicans-violate-voting-rights/Tech%20CEO%20Says%20He%20Doesn't%20Care%20About%20Chinese%20Death%20Camps,%20Alex%20Jones%20Responds" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">VIDEO: Tech CEO Says He Doesn’t Care About Chinese Death Camps, Alex Jones Responds</a>
 
 
source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/espn-analyst-us-shouldnt-criticize-chinas-uyghur-genocide-when-republicans-violate-voting-rights">https://www.infowars.com/posts/espn-analyst-us-shouldnt-criticize-chinas-uyghur-genocide-when-republicans-violate-voting-rights</a>

news ESPN Analyst US Shouldn’t ‘Criticize’ China’s Uyghur Genocide When Republicans Violate ‘Voting Rights’

ESPN guest analyst JA Adande laid cover for China’s human rights abuses of the Uyghur population by claiming that America has no room to “cr...

Is CNN Just a Demented Sex Club Masquerading As a News Network?

news Is CNN Just a Demented Sex Club Masquerading As a News Network?

Kristi Leigh breaks down how the latest CNN sex scandal is threatening to take down the fake news network. She’ll also explain how Canadia...

How to understand the recent coups in Africa

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Over the past eighteen months, there have been seven coups and coup attempts in African nations. In Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan, military leaders succeeded in seizing power; in Niger and, most recently, in Guinea-Bissau, they failed.
On Thursday, following the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/europe-africa-portugal-west-africa-guinea-bissau-15480dcb7a9cd6b407ce7651135c2d46">failed coup</a> in Guinea-Bissau earlier this week, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) convened to discuss the unrest, which ECOWAS chair Nana Akufo-Addo <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20220203-west-african-leaders-hold-summit-after-wave-of-coups-bring-turmoil-to-region">described</a> as “contagious” and a threat to the entire region.
That’s not wrong, according to Joseph Siegle, research director at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
“I think yes, the broader point is there has been a pattern after a period of relatively fewer coups,” Siegle told Vox in a phone call. “It’s reasonable to assume that there’s some copycatting going on, or the norm of militaries not being involved [in government] or seizing power has been broken.”
But while the recent spate of coups have several common characteristics and show what Siegle calls a “dispersion effect,” Joseph Sany, the vice president of the US Institute of Peace’s Africa Center, told Vox in a phone interview that he thinks referring to them as “contagious” is unhelpful.
“I hate the term ‘contagion’ because it’s a blanket term,” Sany said. “You can’t put Guinea in the same group as Mali and Burkina Faso.”
According to Sany, despite some commonalities — governments unable to provide basic services for their people, corruption, and weak state institutions — the circumstances and mechanics of the recent coups and attempts are different.
And not only does labeling recent coups as part of a “contagion” or domino effect erase these differences, he said, it also absolves the world community from helping these countries build sustainable democratic institutions going forward.
Africa’s current wave of coups began in August 2020, after former Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/8/19/21375138/mali-coup-president-keita-military-election">arrested at gunpoint</a> by government forces. The subsequent series of African coups share some commonalities, such as political and economic instability and weak democratic institutions, but Sany says the specific circumstances in each case are crucial to understanding what happened — and potentially, what comes next.
In Mali and Burkina Faso, Sany notes, the governments were dealing with <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/2020/08/five-things-know-about-malis-coup">violent extremism</a> from <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/27/burkina-faso-military-coup-prompts-fears-of-further-instability">ISIS</a> and al-Qaeda affiliates in the Sahel, where between 2020 and 2021, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/02/04/isis-leader-killed-africa-biden/">the Intercept’s Nick Turse</a> reports, attacks by militant Islamist organizations increased 70 percent, from 1,180 to 2,005.
According to Siegle, that security threat has formed the pretext for coups in both countries. “In terms of the differences, Mali and Burkina Faso, the juntas have claimed that insecurity and an inability to deal with threats from violent extremist groups has precipitated the coups,” Siegle said. “They’re both using the same justification, and in the case of Burkina Faso, the threat is more imminent.”
But while it’s a serious concern and terror affiliates drive instability in many African nations, not every country that has undergone a recent coup is dealing with violent insurgency from terror groups.
In Guinea-Bissau, for example, the recent attempted coup is one of many since the nation gained its independence from Portugal in 1974, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/coup-fears-spike-in-guinea-bissau-as-gunfire-heard-in-capital-11643744427?mod=e2tw">Wall Street Journal’s Nicholas Bariyo writes</a>. The nation has struggled to establish democratic traditions and institutions; notably, President Umaro Sissoco Embaló — the man whom this week’s failed coup tried to oust — came to power in 2020, after a contested election which was still being reviewed by the nation’s Supreme Court when Embaló took office.
And in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/world/africa/guinea-coup.html">Guinea</a> — a separate country that borders the smaller Guinea-Bissau — last year’s successful coup came after President Alpha Condé changed the constitution and mounted a power grab that gave him a third term in office. Although he initially won a democratic election in 2010 — the first Guinean leader to do so — his power grab, combined with corruption and deep inequality, apparently provided the impetus the military needed to mount a takeover last September.
The mechanics of these takeovers are different as well; for example, Chad’s military led a “<a href="https://theconversation.com/chads-covert-coup-and-the-implications-for-democratic-governance-in-africa-159725">covert coup</a>” last year, installing the son of the deceased President Idriss Deby, himself a military commander, as the leader in violation of the constitution. The younger Deby’s government is supposed to be “transitional” — his father was Chad’s authoritarian leader for three decades — but since it abolished the constitution and dissolved the previous government and Parliament, it’s not clear where such a transition could lead.
Sudan’s coup, too, came after decades of authoritarian rule; after civil society leadership organized mass protests and <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2019/4/11/18306002/sudan-news-bashir-coup-protests-khartoum-auf">ousted former dictator Omar al-Bashir</a> in 2019, a transitional government comprising military and civilian leadership took over. That <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/8/19/20812054/sudan-power-sharing-deal-al-bashir-trial">power-sharing agreement</a> briefly set Sudan on a democratic trajectory before the military took over last year, eventually leading to civilian Prime Minister <a href="https://www.vox.com/22870160/sudan-protests-hamdok-resigned-coup-military">Abdalla Hamdok’s resignation</a> this past January.
Characterizing the coups as contagious also discounts the influence of outside powers, Sany and Siegle told Vox — primarily Russia and China, and to a lesser extent, <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/sudan/2022-02-04/americas-failure-imagination-sudan">Turkey and Gulf states like Qatar</a>. Broadly speaking, these nations don’t necessarily foment coups, but they do take advantage of instability to support regimes that allow them to exercise influence, legitimize their own antidemocratic systems, and extract resources from nations rich in diamonds, bauxite, and other valuable materials.
“It fits the mold of situations where you have an unelected, unaccountable military leader who doesn’t have a lot of political support, so make him indebted to the Russians,” Siegle said of the recent coup attempt in Guinea-Bissau. “They’ll get access to their iron ore, and [a military leader will] give them political cover. So I see them as very vulnerable to that kind of influence.”
“If you want to know where Russia will go next, look for instability,” Sany said, pointing to the situations in Mali and Burkina Faso in particular. The governments there, facing security crises due to Islamist extremism, were heavily reliant on mercenaries from the Wagner Group — a costly arrangement which further eroded the governments’ ability to provide basic services for people, creating fertile ground for the recent coups and further instability. Adding in the economic and social impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as anti-French, anti-colonial sentiment, Sany said, made for “an explosive cocktail.”
“These military leaders were very savvy to take control,” he said.
That points to another commonality in the recent takeovers, Siegle told Vox. “The coup leaders themselves aren’t necessarily saying what they’re going to do differently, and I think that the similarity that we’re seeing across all the coups is these military actors, which all happen to be mid-level, colonel-level military leaders, they all seem more intent on seizing power and holding power for power’s sake,” he said. “They’re not offering some sort of reformist agenda, a security plan, somehow a return to democracy or improving government, or reducing corruption — anything along those lines.”
Despite their initial success, Sany and Siegle both told Vox, many of these coup leaders will fail in the long term because they’re not equipped to govern, and because they’re working in countries that don’t have the institutions to deliver on any promises they might make. Given that possibility, the road ahead for these nations is unclear at best.
In Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups, Naunihal Singh, a professor at the US Naval War College, points out that citizen and civil society groups can rarely influence military coups as they are happening, and the undoing of a government takeover or the transition to democracy depends either upon fractiousness within the military or the intervention of outside forces, and often a combination of the two.
And there’s good reason for the world to take notice: According to Singh, the “frequency and ubiquity” of coups means they pose a real problem for other democracies.
“Indeed,” Singh writes, “coups are responsible for roughly 75% of democratic failures, making them the single largest danger to democracy.”
That presents outside powers with a choice: work with civil society leaders and military governments to help these nations develop and strengthen institutions and a timeline for democratic transition, or exploit the chaos to gain a foothold for resource extraction and further exploitation, as Russia has done in several recent cases.
However, sanctioning these nations and isolating them, as the European Union and the US have done to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/eu-imposes-sanctions-malis-pm-coup-leaders-2022-02-04/">Malian coup leaders</a>, does nothing but harm the citizens of those countries and only pushes coup leadership away from democratic foundations, Sany said. “We are asking these nations to be like Denmark, when they don’t have the resources,” he told Vox.
According to Sany, Western countries and institutions — which have their own vested interests in the region; their own brutal, exploitative, and extractive history of colonialism in Africa; and their own strangleholds on poor nations <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/business/economy/imf-surcharges.html">in the form of debt</a> — impress upon unstable nations with undemocratic leadership the importance of the rule of law and punish them when they don’t live up to those ideals, but don’t speak to the actual needs of the people living in those nations.
Nor, he said, do they present particularly viable pathways for a transition to democracy: “By putting on blanket sanctions, you alienate and punish citizens” without addressing the root cause of the instability, Sany told Vox, precipitating further instability and potentially even further coups.
Instead, according to Sany, Western powers need to work better with these countries to look honestly at the root causes of conflict, poverty, and instability; help them build up and invest in stronger institutions; and work with civil society and military leaders to lay out a path to democratic transition. Furthermore, working with regional groups like ECOWAS and neighboring African countries to encourage cooperation and reduce isolation can be an effective way to reduce the risk of undemocratic takeovers, since peer nations can be highly influential, he said.
Without support for democratic systems, civil society, and institutions for justice and transparency, Sany warns, history will repeat itself.
“Coup breeds coup,” he said. “There will be protracted instability unless the world community gets involved.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/2/5/22919160/coup-guinea-bissau-africa-burkina-faso-sudan-why">https://www.vox.com/2022/2/5/22919160/coup-guinea-bissau-africa-burkina-faso-sudan-why</a>

vox How to understand the recent coups in Africa

Over the past eighteen months, there have been seven coups and coup attempts in African nations. In Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, and S...

Will climate change melt the Winter Olympics?

For decades, Jeremy Jones has explored unique and pristine winter slopes around the world on his snowboard. He’s found new routes accessible only via helicopter and snowmobile, making a name for himself as a big mountain snowboarder, filmmaker, and entrepreneur. In the process, he developed a sense for subtle variations in wind, snow, ice, and water.
“The type of snowboarding I do requires me to have an incredibly intimate relationship with winter,” said Jones, who is 47. “I snowboard in the backcountry where the difference between a slope being stable and avalanching has lots of nuanced signs.”
But the ground beneath his feet started to shift, and so did his thinking. Resorts that used to have reliable snow started closing more frequently. Some mountains started getting more rain than snow as glaciers retreated up their slopes. For Jones and many fellow winter enthusiasts, climate change became impossible to ignore. “I was like, man, this problem is not going away without us doing something about it,” Jones said.
It’s not just snowboarding — climate change is already having an impact on several winter activities, including many of the outdoor sports on display at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. On average, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/02/18/803125282/how-warming-winters-are-affecting-everything">winters are warming faster than summers</a> and <a href="https://www.nps.gov/subjects/aknatureandscience/hi-latclimatechange.htm">northern latitudes are warming faster</a> than regions closer to the equator. Sports that count on outdoor snow and ice are especially vulnerable. In a warming world, precious few cities may be reliably cold with enough snow and ice to host Winter Olympics of the future.
In 2007, Jones founded the advocacy group <a href="https://protectourwinters.org/about-pow/">Protect Our Winters</a> with the aim of uniting winter sports enthusiasts in the fight against climate change. With the world’s eyes on the Winter Games, athletes-turned-advocates are hoping to channel some of that attention toward the ways climate change threatens their sports. And the group’s latest report, “<a href="https://www.lboro.ac.uk/sport/news/2022/january/how-climate-change-is-threatening-winter-olympics/">Slippery Slopes: How Climate Change is threatening the 2022 Winter Olympics</a>,” warns that without drastic action, many of the sports that thrill fans and athletes are endangered.
Warmer winters aren’t just leading to mushier snow, the authors write. The places where winter sports can be played at all are becoming fewer and farther between. That makes it harder for athletes to train and makes winter sports more expensive and exclusive, throttling the pipeline for new skiers, snowboarders, and skaters. It’s an early warning sign for the future of winter itself.
This is the first year in history that the Winter Games will have to manufacture all of its own snow. Organizers expected as much, given that Beijing has never been known for especially snowy winters. But winter sports have been increasingly reliant on artificial conditions for years. “Things have been trending in this direction for quite some time,” said <a href="https://education.gsu.edu/profile/timothy-kellison/">Timothy Kellison</a>, director of the Center for Sport and Urban policy at Georgia State University.
Artificial snow is designed in part to level the playing field and deliver consistent conditions for sports. But it’s also a sign that the ideal conditions for outdoor events like alpine skiing are getting harder to find in nature. Rising temperatures mean that more winter precipitation falls as rain rather than snow, and the snow that does fall can be less substantial.
Covering a mountain slope in synthetic powder can harm the environment and add to the already enormous costs of large-scale winter sports (the Beijing Winter Olympics reportedly cost <a href="https://www.insider.com/real-cost-of-beijing-games-10-times-chinas-reported-figure-2022-1">$3.9 billion</a>, though some estimates show the cost is much higher). Snow-making has massive energy appetite and stresses water sources. And the snow itself is a pale imitation of what falls from the sky. Artificial snow is about 30 percent ice and 70 percent air, whereas natural snow is 10 percent ice and 90 percent air. That changes the texture of the snow, creating a harder snowpack that alters how skis and snowboards slide, so courses require further grooming.
In addition, snow machines still require cold temperatures to operate. In the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, snowmaking equipment couldn’t keep up with the unusually warm weather, so organizers used <a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/sochi-among-warmest-winter-olympics-host-cities">trucks and helicopters to bring in snow</a> from elsewhere.
And there’s only so much snow you can keep on the ground when temperatures get too high, regardless of where it comes from. The snow quickly softens, forms ruts, and creates a spray when athletes cut through it. That can impair visibility and lead to accidents, explained <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/geography-environmental-management/people-profiles/daniel-scott">Daniel Scott</a>, a professor of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Yet the option of artificial snow has allowed Winter Olympics organizers to select host cities that are far from ideal. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia set a record for the <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2014/02/sochi-s-average-temperature-it-was-the-warmest-winter-olympics-ever.html">highest temperature at a Winter Olympics</a>: 68 degrees Fahrenheit. That was also a problem for the Winter Paralympic Games that came after. “In Sochi, <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27307272/">[the injury rate] was six times</a> what it was in Vancouver for the Paralympians,” Scott said. “These are the best in the world, so if they’re struggling with those kinds of conditions and many of them are getting hurt by it, that should tell you something.”
The impacts of climate change stretch beyond the Games as well. As training sites deal with rising temperatures, athletes need to spend more money and time finding reliable locations. Otherwise, they arrive at the slopes less prepared. “We also see more injuries caused by the lack of practice on snow and the added pressure to perform when there is a window of opportunities,” Philippe Marquis, a two-time Winter Olympian from Canada, wrote in the “Slippery Slopes” report. “Athletes feel the urge to push their limits even if the conditions are suboptimal.”
Many candidate cities for the Winter Olympics — including past hosts — won’t be consistently cold or snowy enough to hold the games in the future. This means the pool of host cities will shrink drastically, or hosts will have to spend far more time, money, and energy to prepare for future Winter Olympics. For example, Chamonix and Innsbruck in the Alps — a mountain range that lends its name to the Olympic event of Alpine skiing — may have to be ruled out for good if greenhouse gas emissions continue spewing unchecked.
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<figcaption>Potential Winter Olympics host cities may have less reliable conditions for the Games depending on different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.</figcaption>
<cite><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.sportecology.org/research" target="_blank">Slippery Slopes: How climate change is threatening the Winter Olympics</a></cite></figure>
Beyond the Olympics, winter recreation areas like <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/ski-resorts-and-climate-change/">ski resorts</a> are becoming more expensive to operate or are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/travel/global-warming-ski-resort.html">struggling to stay open</a>, increasingly making winter sports the purview of the privileged elite. By one estimate, the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378016305556">winter recreation season in the US</a> will be cut in half by 2050.
Without direct experience, fans may have a harder time getting interested in and following professional winter sports, according to Kellison. “I do think as participation goes down in these sports, there will be concerns about the [fandom] of that sport at the highest levels,” he said.
The love of winter sports poses a dilemma for some fans and athletes. “To face a future without these sports is challenging, but it’s equally challenging to wrestle with the massive environmental footprint that our sport can have, from the emissions involved in getting to the mountain, to snowmaking, and the energy involved in operating lifts and lights and all the rest,” said <a href="https://www.madeleineorr.com/">Madeline Orr</a>, founder of the Sport Ecology Group and a lecturer Loughborough University London, in an email. “That said, I have full confidence the industry and snow sports community will find ways to continue innovating on this issue and finding ways to adapt, because snow sports are central to our culture.”
For Jones, the big mountain snowboarder, climate change has made him rethink how he pursues his career. “My approach drastically changed to the point of way less travel, and no longer embracing helicopters and snowmobiles,” Jones said. He said he’s “really focusing on human power — foot-power snowboarding where I’m hiking these mountains.”
He acknowledged that in the big picture, losing places to ski, snowshoe, and snowboard are less devastating than other impacts of climate change. Rising winter temperatures are slowing the accumulation of snowpack in key watersheds, and in areas like the Sierra Nevada, that’s leading to patterns of flooding in the winter and drought in the summer. Declining snowpack is a key factor in <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/02/27/810095428/low-snowpack-in-california-mountains-may-mean-more-wildfires-this-summer">wildfire risk and recovery</a> in the Western US. Warmer winters are also fueling <a href="https://www.vox.com/22383707/allergies-2021-pollen-allergy-covid-19-climate-change-asthma">more severe allergy seasons</a>, helping disease-carrying critters spread further, and creating a mismatch between <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/109/23/9000?ijkey=51ababeaf63fc71a1899f04e299ae953a65aa275&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha">flowering plants and their pollinators</a>.
But winter sports also help create more than $800 billion in economic activity in the US, support more than 7 million jobs, and inspire millions to head outdoors into chilly weather, according to Protect Our Winters. The Winter Olympics are a prime opportunity to channel the world’s attention toward a threat and motivate people to find solutions.
“To me, it’s this opportunity to collectively come together around trying to save winter,” Jones said. “We need urgency on climate action.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22905168/beijing-winter-olympics-2022-climate-change-snow">https://www.vox.com/22905168/beijing-winter-olympics-2022-climate-change-snow</a>

vox Will climate change melt the Winter Olympics?

For decades, Jeremy Jones has explored unique and pristine winter slopes around the world on his snowboard. He’s found new routes accessible...